path: root/about/resources.md

 Resources

This site contains a list of resources I find and found helpful. I am not an expert in all of these topics, but all the resources listed here impacted me. I read some of the books quite a long time ago, so there might be newer editions out there already, and I might need to refresh some of the knowledge.

The list may not be exhaustive, but I will be adding more in the future. I firmly believe that educating yourself further is one of the most important things to advance. The lists are in random order and reshuffled every time (via *sort -R*) when updates are made.

You won't find any links on this site because, over time, the links will break. Please use your favourite search engine when you are interested in one of the resources...

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## Table of Contents

* [⇢ ⇢ Technical books](#technical-books)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical references](#technical-references)
* [⇢ ⇢ Self-development and soft-skills books](#self-development-and-soft-skills-books)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical video lectures and courses](#technical-video-lectures-and-courses)
* [⇢ ⇢ Technical guides](#technical-guides)
* [⇢ ⇢ Podcasts](#podcasts)
* [⇢ ⇢ ⇢ Podcasts I like](#podcasts-i-like)
* [⇢ ⇢ ⇢ Podcasts I liked](#podcasts-i-liked)
* [⇢ ⇢ Newsletters I like](#newsletters-i-like)
* [⇢ ⇢ Magazines I like(d)](#magazines-i-liked)
* [⇢ Formal education](#formal-education)

## Technical books

In random order:

* Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale; David N. Blank-Edelman; eBook
* C++ Programming Language; Bjarne Stroustrup;
* Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms; Andrew S. Tanenbaum; Pearson
* Site Reliability Engineering; How Google runs production systems; O'Reilly
* The Pragmatic Programmer; David Thomas; Addison-Wesley
* Leanring eBPF; Liz Rice; O'Reilly
* Programming Perl aka "The Camel Book"; Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall & Jon Orwant; O'Reilly
* Amazon Web Services in Action; Michael Wittig and Andreas Wittig; Manning Publications
* Kubernetes Cookbook; Sameer Naik, Sébastien Goasguen, Jonathan Michaux; O'Reilly
* The Docker Book; James Turnbull; Kindle
* Perl New Features; Joshua McAdams, brian d foy; Perl School
* 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; Teiva Harsanyi; Manning Publications
* The DevOps Handbook; Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis; Audible
* DNS and BIND; Cricket Liu; O'Reilly
* Ultimate Go Notebook; Bill Kennedy
* Raku Recipes; J.J. Merelo; Apress
* DevOps And Site Reliability Engineering Handbook; Stephen Fleming; Audible
* Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!; Miran Lipovaca; No Starch Press
* Systems Performance Tuning; Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci and others...; O'Reilly
* Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good; Fred Herbert; No Starch Press
* The Practise of System and Network Administration; Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, Strata R. Chalup; Addison-Wesley Professional Pro Git; Scott Chacon, Ben Straub; Apress
* Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition); Noel Rappin, with Dave Thomas; The Pragmatic Bookshelf
* Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-free Development; Brain P. Hogan; The Pragmatic Programmers 
* Raku Fundamentals; Moritz Lenz; Apress
* Developing Games in Java; David Brackeen and others...; New Riders
* Higher Order Perl; Mark Dominus; Morgan Kaufmann
* Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C; Axel-Tobias Schreiner
* Effective awk programming; Arnold Robbins; O'Reilly
* Hands-on Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus; Joel Bastos, Pedro Araujo; Packt 
* Modern Perl; Chromatic ; Onyx Neon Press
* Go Brain Teasers - Exercise Your Mind; Miki Tebeka; The Pragmatic Programmers
* Terraform Cookbook; Mikael Krief; Packt Publishing
* Pro Puppet; James Turnbull, Jeffrey McCune; Apress
* The Go Programming Language; Alan A. A. Donovan; Addison-Wesley Professional
* Effective Java; Joshua Bloch; Addison-Wesley Professional
* Clusterbau mit Linux-HA; Michael Schwartzkopff; O'Reilly
* Concurrency in Go; Katherine Cox-Buday; O'Reilly
* Data Science at the Command Line; Jeroen Janssens; O'Reilly
* Funktionale Programmierung; Peter Pepper; Springer
* The Kubernetes Book; Nigel Poulton; Unabridged Audiobook
* 97 things every SRE should know; Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo; O'Reilly
* Think Raku (aka Think Perl 6); Laurent Rosenfeld, Allen B. Downey; O'Reilly
* The KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) Book; Nigel Poulton
* Java ist auch eine Insel; Christian Ullenboom; 
* 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School; Ben Klemens; O'Reilly
* Chaos Engineering - System Resiliency in Practice; Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones; eBook
* Polished Ruby Programming; Jeremy Evans; Packt Publishing
* Systemprogrammierung in Go; Frank Müller; dpunkt

## Technical references

I didn't read them from the beginning to the end, but I am using them to look up things. The books are in random order:

* BPF Performance Tools - Linux System and Application Observability, Brendan Gregg; Addison Wesley
* Relayd and Httpd Mastery; Michael W Lucas
* Algorithms; Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne; Addison Wesley
* The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; No Starch Press 
* Groovy Kurz & Gut; Joerg Staudemeier; O'Reilly
* Implementing Service Level Objectives; Alex Hidalgo; O'Reilly
* Understanding the Linux Kernel; Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati; O'Reilly
* Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects; Mat Ryer; Packt

## Self-development and soft-skills books

In random order:

* Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction; Susan Blackmore; Oxford Uiversity Press
* Soft Skills; John Sommez; Manning Publications
* Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track; Will Larson; Audiobook
* Never Split the Difference; Chris Voss, Tahl Raz; Random House Business
* The Phoenix Project - A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win; Gene Kim and Kevin Behr; Trade Select
* Eat That Frog; Brian Tracy
* The Off Switch; Mark Cropley; Virgin Books (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
* Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming, Peter Seibel and Mitchell Dorian et al., Audiobook
* Eat That Frog!; Brian Tracy; Hodder Paperbacks
* The Software Engineer's Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups; Gergely Orosz; Audiobook 
* Meditation for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, Audiobook
* Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace); Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn; HarperOne
* So Good They Can't Ignore You; Cal Newport; Business Plus
* The Daily Stoic; Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman; Profile Books
* Stop starting, start finishing; Arne Roock; Lean-Kanban University  
* Getting Things Done; David Allen
* The Power of Now; Eckhard Tolle; Yellow Kite
* The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide; John Sonmez; Unabridged Audiobook
* 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know; Camille Fournier; Audiobook
* 101 Essays that change the way you think; Brianna Wiest; Audiobook
* Time Management for System Administrators; Thomas A. Limoncelli; O'Reilly
* Atomic Habits; James Clear; Random House Business
* Slow Productivity; Cal Newport; Penguin Random House
* Solve for Happy; Mo Gawdat (RE-READ 1ST TIME)
* Psycho-Cybernetics; Maxwell Maltz; Perigee Books
* Who Moved My Cheese?; Dr. Spencer Johnson; Vermilion
* Ultralearning; Scott Young; Thorsons
* Ultralearning; Anna Laurent; Self-published via Amazon
* The Courage to Be Disliked; Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga; Audiobook
* Influence without Authority; A. Cohen, D. Bradford; Wiley
* The Good Enough Job; Simone Stolzoff; Ebury Edge
* Deep Work; Cal Newport; Piatkus
* Digital Minimalism; Cal Newport; Portofolio Penguin
* The Bullet Journal Method; Ryder Carroll; Fourth Estate
* The Obstacle Is The Way; Ryan Holiday; Profile Books Ltd
* The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People; Stephen R. Covey; Simon & Schuster UK
* The Joy of Missing Out; Christina Crook; New Society Publishers
* Buddah and Einstein walk into a Bar; Guy Joseph Ale, Claire Bloom; Blackstone Publishing

[Here are notes of mine for some of the books](../notes/index.md)  

## Technical video lectures and courses

Some of these were in-person with exams; others were online learning lectures only. In random order:

* Apache Tomcat Best Practises; 3-day on-site training
* AWS Immersion Day; Amazon; 1-day interactive online training 
* Scripting Vim; Damian Conway; O'Reilly Online
* F5 Loadbalancers Training; 2-day on-site training; F5, Inc. 
* Linux Security and Isolation APIs Training; Michael Kerrisk; 3-day on-site training
* MySQL Deep Dive Workshop; 2-day on-site training
* Protocol buffers; O'Reilly Online
* Ultimate Go Programming; Bill Kennedy; O'Reilly Online
* The Ultimate Kubernetes Bootcamp; School of Devops; O'Reilly Online
* Red Hat Certified System Administrator; Course + certification (Although I had the option, I decided not to take the next course as it is more effective to self learn what I need)
* Cloud Operations on AWS - Learn how to configure, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot your AWS environments; 3-day online live training with labs; Amazon
* Functional programming lecture; Remote University of Hagen
* Algorithms Video Lectures; Robert Sedgewick; O'Reilly Online
* Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Harold Abelson and more...; 
* The Well-Grounded Rubyist Video Edition; David. A. Black; O'Reilly Online
* Developing IaC with Terraform (with Live Lessons); O'Reilly Online

## Technical guides

These are not whole books, but guides (smaller or larger) which I found very useful. in random order:

* How CPUs work at https://cpu.land
* Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide 
* Raku Guide at https://raku.guide  

## Podcasts

### Podcasts I like

In random order:

* Hidden Brain
* BSD Now [BSD]
* Backend Banter
* Wednesday Wisdom
* Modern Mentor
* Cup o' Go [Golang]
* Fallthrough [Golang]
* Maintainable
* Fork Around And Find Out
* The Changelog Podcast(s)
* Dev Interrupted
* The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
* The ProdCast (Google SRE Podcast)
* Pratical AI
* Deep Questions with Cal Newport

### Podcasts I liked

I liked them but am not listening to them anymore. The podcasts have either "finished" (no more episodes) or I stopped listening to them due to time constraints or a shift in my interests.

* FLOSS weekly
* Modern Mentor
* Java Pub House
* CRE: Chaosradio Express [german]
* Ship It (predecessor of Fork Around And Find Out)
* Go Time (predecessor of fallthrough)

## Newsletters I like

This is a mix of tech and non-tech newsletters I am subscribed to. In random order:

* The Valuable Dev
* Monospace Mentor
* Changelog News
* Applied Go Weekly Newsletter
* Andreas Brandhorst Newsletter (Sci-Fi author)
* byteSizeGo
* Ruby Weekly
* The Pragmatic Engineer
* Golang Weekly
* Register Spill
* VK Newsletter
* The Imperfectionist

## Magazines I like(d)

This is a mix of tech I like(d). I may not be a current subscriber, but now and then, I buy an issue. In random order:

* freeX (not published anymore)
* LWN (online only)
* Linux Magazine
* Linux User

# Formal education

I have met many self-taught IT professionals I highly respect. In my own opinion, a formal degree does not automatically qualify a person for a particular job. It is more about how you educate yourself further *after* formal education. The pragmatic way of thinking and getting things done do not require a college or university degree.

However, I still believe a degree in Computer Science helps to understand all the theories involved that you would have never learned otherwise. Isn't it cool to understand how compilers work under the hood (automata theory) even if you are not required to hack the compiler in your current position? You could apply the same theory for other things too. This was just *one* example.

* One year Student exchange program in OH, USA
* German School Majors (Abitur), focus areas: German and Mathematics
* Half-year internship as a C/C++ programmer in Sofia, Bulgaria
* Graduated from University as Diplom-Inform. (FH) at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Germany

My diploma thesis, "Object-oriented development of a GUI based tool for event-based simulation of distributed systems," can be found at:

[https://codeberg.org/snonux/vs-sim](https://codeberg.org/snonux/vs-sim)  

I was one of the last students handed out an "old fashioned" German Diploma degree before the University switched to the international Bachelor and Master versions. To give you an idea: The "Diplom-Inform. (FH)" means translated "Diploma in Informatics from a University of Applied Sciences (FH: Fachhochschule)". Going after the international student credit score, it can be seen as an equivalent to a  "Master in Computer Science" degree.

Colleges and Universities are costly in many countries. Come to Germany, the first college degree is for free (if you finish within a certain deadline!)

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